I had, over the years, collected things, small things, as people do, and I had put them all together and showed them in what became a building in the form of the Geometric Mouse.

I had no idea what art was. There was one art class in high school, but it didn't make a big impression on me. Then I went to college and thought I'd become a writer.

The thing about the ray gun is, you pick up anything you see on the street that's the shape of a gun.

I was always interested in drawing. As a child, I started my own country, which was called Neubern. It was located in the South Atlantic. I did the documentation of Neubern in great detail. I drew everything that was there, all the houses and all the cars and all the people. We even had a navy and an air force. I spent a lot of time drawing.

Food is like clay; you can sculpt with it. Also it has an odor, and you can eat it. I don't eat a lot of cake, but I do make cakes! And unlike the Campbell's Soup Cans, my food is a humanized form and scale.

When you're working with an object, you can put in almost anything you want, you can make it abstract.

I am an immigrant in a sense. What happened was that my father was stationed in New York when my mother became pregnant, and she said, "I've got to go to Sweden so this child can be born there, because you don't have any idea where you're going to be transferred next."